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A Load off my Mind

I am feeling quite relieved as of late. For most of this project I had an expected workflow down for creating textures. Even way back in September I was working on solidifying a way of easily and accurately creating high-quality textures for all of our assets (of which there are a million, give or take 999,990 or so). But now that I actually have the process tested, I’m ready for the production pass to begin on asset textures.

The Shock Rifle texture is about 75% done. There are still some tweaks to be made and it doesn’t include all of the decals, but you can definitely get a sense of what the final asset will look like. Note how we are trying to blend realistic touches with a supersaturated style to compliment the angular forms.

Using the newest version of dDo (my old posts were made using the freely-available, slightly older version) I have created a workflow that allows me to build textures for all of the assets procedurally. The best part of this, however, is that once I create a texture I can save it as a preset. In this way I can build a library of every material found in the game and quickly apply them to new assets without much fuss.

Three of the material presets created specifically for Parallax. The painted white metal material is a good example of the limitations of the process, however, as I had to remove all hand-painted decals before saving the preset. Only procedural details can be saved.

Of course, there is still a good amount of manual work to be done for each texture set, but this process gives me a solid base much faster than I would have doing so manually. Not only that, but it makes revisions much easier and allows me to more easily work on my textures in real-time (thanks to both the complex 3D renderer included in dDo and its integration with different programs such as UE4). My hope is to soon have the Shock Rifle completely textured. Not only that, but I also hope to have the Radarts texture (version 3, ugh) completed soon as a test of the material presets library and its implementation. I also have the logo asset modeled and mapped for texturing so I’ll probably texture that soon (that may be a higher priority than the Radarts texture because not only of its relative simplicity but also because it can then be used as an asset on our upcoming website, details for which are forthcoming). This week I was relatively busy for much of my usual free time but I still managed 16 hours of work. Not only that, but I managed to be relatively efficient in my work, nearly completing the Shock Rifle texture set and the Sonic Shotgun concept art (something I’ll talk about in a later post; for now just consider the possible awesomeness of a weapon called the Sonic Shotgun. Here’s the breakdown: